by David Hewson
In a little while she would see the Carpaccio painting that had so distressed the fictional Jerome Aitchison. It was time to attempt to divide fiction from fact.
This was her third day without email or the Internet and the absence of both was starting to hurt. When she got off the fast boat across the Basin she went into the commercial back streets near the Mondadori bookstore, found a phone shop and handed over her credit card for a cheap netbook computer with mobile broadband. Then she walked beneath the arches of the Museo Correr into the Piazza San Marco.
Carnival was still in full flow. A procession of brightly coloured and skimpily dressed drag queens was parading around the piazza where the day before Jerome Aitchison, in the black costume and white mask of the Plague Doctor, had plummeted to his death. There was nothing to indicate where the Englishman had met his end. The police and forensic scientists had done their job and the cleaners had followed with their mops and bleach. Teresa wondered whether she would have allowed the public to walk over those patterned stones so quickly had such a terrible event happened in Rome. If it was in the heart of a tourist area she guessed she’d have had little choice. The city authorities would be screaming for a return to what passed as normality. In Venice the pressure would be even greater. As Filippo Strozzi had pointed out, there was only one industry here now. Anything that got between visitors and their cash had to be removed, scrubbed away like the Englishman’s bloodstains on the pavement of the piazza just a few short steps away from where she now stood. In truth if Aitchison’s death was as simple as it seemed there was probably no good reason to preserve them. People were always uncomfortable around death, even though it walked the same streets as they, an invisible companion night and day.
She bought a couple of newspapers, took a deep breath and went into Florian, paying a price for a caffè that almost made her eyes water. But the place was elegant and largely deserted, she was able to spread out the papers and her netbook across an entire table in its mirrored interior and for that kind of money she would stay as long as she liked.
The violent incident during the Flight of the Angel was, unsurprisingly, the lead story everywhere. The papers were so certain of their facts – all of them identical – that Teresa felt like calling the Venice Questura’s public relations office and congratulating them on doing such a great job.
In every edition the story had a depressing similarity. Aitchison was a sad Englishman, sacked from his job over an unproven accusation of sexual misconduct. He had come to Venice on a whim, spent much of his time drunk and, it would seem, becoming obsessed with the young TV starlet Luisa Cammarota, whose face and, more importantly, body had been all over the magazines thanks to her varied and highly public love life. The young woman had enjoyed ‘flings’ with rich businessmen, politicians, actors, footballers and, most recently, a young and talkative car mechanic from Naples who had a talent for photography. So notorious had she become that it was, the media seemed to argue, scarcely unexpected that some foreign lunatic should fix upon her as the object of his unobtainable desires.
Teresa read the stories, cursing every word. There was nothing tangible to link Aitchison to the young woman. No letters, no messages of any kind. The man had left his lodgings in Castello one week before when the owner went on holiday to Kenya. Since she was still there no one knew where he had been living in the meantime. The assumption was out on the street. How did a homeless man acquire an authentic and presumably expensive costume for the Plague Doctor? And a gun? No one seemed to know, or demonstrate much interest in finding an answer. The strange, murderous and incompetent Englishman was dead. Why waste time on the corpse of a fool?
All that was certain was that this curious bachelor had somehow secreted himself inside the campanile early the previous morning, waited for the event to start, then walked out onto the ledge beneath the open arches and half-heartedly tried to kill Luisa Cammarota before stepping out into thin air a hundred metres above ground.
The one loose thread that seemed to concern the papers was Aitchison’s body. So solitary was the man that he had no relative or friends who wished to come to Venice to claim his remains. Nor did the British Consulate intend to pay to repatriate his corpse for a pointless funeral in England. Cue outrage on the part of the local media that the man who so shockingly disrupted the opening ceremony of the Carnival might end up being cremated locally at a cost to the taxpayers of Venice.
There were so many open questions here Teresa scarcely knew where to begin. The most important of all being, simply, why? Aitchison was a university lecturer in the obscure field of actuarial science at a famous Cambridge college until his fall from favour. What would make such an intellectual man develop a murderous obsession with a young Italian TV starlet? The woman was, according to the papers, unknown in England. Could such a deadly fixation really have occurred over the last few weeks? And where did this leave his relations with Sofia, a woman more than twenty years her senior, yet someone, it appeared, with whom he had an affair, one her aunt found close and satisfying?
The pages of the previous night’s story were in her bag. She took them out and spread them across the antique glass table in Florian’s, ignoring the surprised look of the waiter, who clearly did not associate the place with business. Some answers had to lie in this odd narrative and what details she recalled of its predecessor, now disappeared, presumably for good.
Teresa plugged her new computer into the wall and went online. She was grateful to be back in contact with the outside world. Already Venice was starting to feel as if it were detached somehow from the rest of Italy, even from reality itself.
The next twenty minutes confirmed several points that were raised by both stories. She established that there was such a thing as disappearing printer ink for sensitive commercial and government use, and that the paper stock for the commonest brand was, indeed, mustard yellow and simply required a special cartridge for an ordinary printer.
Then she typed in the name of the apparently fictional Arnaud, the Count of Saint-Germain.
A distinct and unwelcome chill came upon her as she watched the search page fill up with endless references, some literary, some historical, a few in the wilder reaches of the human imagination. She had assumed this character was, like much else she’d read, pure fiction. Perhaps he was. Perhaps not. According to the more reliable sites there was a man called Arnaud Saint-Germain active in European society in the eighteenth century, a musician and a philosopher to some, both wizard and con artist to others. Contemporary diaries cited him in Rome, London, Paris, Vienna, Madrid and Naples. He was also mentioned by Casanova in his Venetian memoirs.
Several literary references said that he claimed to possess the secret of the mythical Philosopher’s Stone that could turn lead into gold, and relieved rich fools of their fortunes by promising to pass it on . . . and then disappearing. A similar number also recorded that he claimed to have found an elixir which gave him eternal life.
Much of this Teresa could take as fact. What followed veered into pure fantasy. A man claiming to be him appeared in Russia in the 1830s. In New York in 1876 the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky reported a meeting with a ‘nobleman named Saint-Germain’ who advised on some philosophical principles in her book Isis Unveiled. Twenty years later the name appears in records of spiritualist and bohemian circles in fin-de-siècle London, the same individual supposedly making the acquaintance, among others, of Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and the artist Aubrey Beardsley. Twenty-five years after that a controversial Hopi mystic from Arizona ‘revealed’ himself to be Saint-Germain before disappearing when the police came to call, asking about money.
This was, Teresa surmised, a neat trick. The name was one that con men had used over the centuries in order to baffle and fool the gullible. A point Peroni had once made came to mind. There is no better way to make a lie more convincing than to clothe it in truth. Another memory returned too, of a line from that amusing English comic opera The Mikado. This kind
of trick was ‘merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative’.
There was cunning behind these stories.
She checked her watch. It would soon be time to meet Tosi. This prompted another search, one for ‘the First International Symposium on the Genetic Analysis of the Skeletal Remains Attributed to St Mark’.
The results of that proved no surprise either.
Walking across the piazza, admiring the delicately ornate front of the basilica which glistened in the bright winter sun like the skin of an exotic tattooed jungle native, she steeled herself for the conversation ahead, then called Frascati.
Her father answered and, when he heard the tone of her voice, very rapidly passed the call over. There was a brief exchange of semi-pleasantries, then Teresa asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?’
The line went silent for so long she thought her mother had put down the phone. Then a tired old voice on the other end said, ‘My, we are the detective, aren’t we?’
‘No. I’m not at all. I’m struggling here. I can’t get the police interested. I can’t make head nor tail of what’s going on. I haven’t the faintest clue what’s happened to Sofia. Which makes me all the more worried. You do want to know, don’t you?’
She hated the anger and outrage in her own voice.
‘Perhaps I’ve a better idea than you,’ Chiara said miserably.
‘Stop this now, Mother!’
‘You think you know her.’
And you do? The question remained unsaid. It seemed kindest.
‘Why didn’t you tell me she’d lost a baby?’ Teresa asked instead. ‘How can I hope to make some progress if you hold things back?’
‘She didn’t lose the baby,’ her mother said in a resigned, quiet, patient voice. ‘She got rid of it. As if it was something unimportant. Then the guilt almost destroyed her.’
The basilisk faces of the saints and nobles on the façade of the basilica stared down at her, their stern frowns passing judgement. Abortion. Her mother was a good and faithful Catholic. Sofia, like her niece, never gave a second thought to what they both regarded as some archaic form of superstition.
A sudden, sharp thought occurred to her. Was that something she’d picked up from Sofia too? Her atheism? Her dismissal of anything that couldn’t be counted as part of the here and now? Possibly. One more reason for her mother to feel aggrieved by the easy, natural closeness they had for one another as Teresa was growing up.
‘Sofia wouldn’t take a decision like that easily,’ Teresa said.
‘What right do you have to say that? None of us understands her reasons. She never explained them to me. If it wasn’t for the doctors I might not have known. She just lay there in that hospital bed, silent, tears in her eyes, staring at the ceiling. Apparently she went to some private doctor across the water in Mestre. There were problems but she left the clinic before they could be remedied. Then she took some pills and walked into the hospital like a lost beggar, almost at death’s door. She could never have children afterwards. There were complications.’
So many unknown facts. So much about Sofia that Teresa had never understood. The tears were starting at the back of her eyes and she had no idea whether they stemmed from anger or grief or both.
‘Anything else to tell me?’ Teresa Lupo asked her mother.
‘No.’
‘The father?’
‘Never mentioned one. She was on her own in Venice as far as I knew. Perhaps she didn’t even have a name for him. The life she led was shameful . . .’
‘Do not talk about her like that.’
‘Like what?’ Chiara cried. ‘Like one who knew her for what she was? Not worshipped her as some distant heroine? I looked after Sofia as if she were my own child. One day she leaves me. Goes out into the world thinking she’s grown up, ready, able to look after herself. Not so. She was as much a baby as that poor infant she killed . . .’
Teresa took the phone away from her ear. Religion, decency, the mores of the twenty-first century . . . these were all subjects on which she and her mother had agreed to differ in silence for years. It was the only way there could be peace between them.
‘I want you to hear some names,’ she said, fighting to keep calm. ‘Please think about them. Tell me if they mean anything.’
She listed all she could think of. Jerome Aitchison. Alberto Tosi. Filippo Strozzi. Arnaud Saint-Germain. And finally, out of nothing more than desperation, Camilla Dushku.
In a way she felt guilty bringing them all into the equation. But they were the only names she had. And Venice was an island, a city divided from the world by that shifting slab of silver sea. It made sense to start with what was here.
Her mother paused for a moment and said, ‘I do read the newspapers. That Englishman who killed himself yesterday was called Aitchison. What’s he got to do with this?’
‘Probably nothing,’ Teresa lied. ‘Do any of these names sound familiar?’
She knew what the answer would be so it came as no surprise. There was a note of resignation, of mourning even in her mother’s voice. Chiara was preparing herself for the worst of news because, in her heart, she felt that was what any rational person ought to expect. Sofia had struggled to survive on her own, embroidering the sadness of her lonely life with lies and self-deception. Sixteen years before, that fantasy had briefly fallen apart. She had almost slipped beneath the surface. Chiara had somehow dragged her back only to let go again, inevitably, as Sofia appeared to find herself once more.
There were deep scars here, ones that still itched and ached.
‘How did you find out? About the baby?’ Chiara asked with some trepidation for once in her voice.
‘She told someone. In the apartment block. At Christmas. When she was down one night. And after that she got better. She was happy. Very happy, I think. Which makes it all the more odd. Mother . . .’
‘I don’t want to argue with you. Please . . .’
‘No. This isn’t an argument. I need you to know. Sofia wasn’t miserable before she disappeared. She was bright and cheerful. She had a man, I think.’
‘The men were always the problem.’
The two of them were just a single step, a few short words, from another explosion. Teresa was determined to avoid this.
‘Are you sure there’s nothing else I ought to know?’
‘That was my only secret. You think it’s a small one?’
‘You should have told me. It might have saved some time. And yes. I think it’s not such a big secret that you should keep it to yourself. In the circumstances.’
‘That’s why we’re so different.’ A brittle judgemental tone had entered Chiara’s voice again. ‘Don’t raise your hopes too highly. Sofia never meant anyone any harm. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t capable of inflicting it. She was my sister. I loved her. I still do. But she was always careless, with herself, with the emotions of others. She never once noticed the damage she did.’ Her mother took a deep breath, audible on the line, then said, ‘Don’t let that part of her touch you. The scars don’t heal easily. I know.’
After the call she walked to the waterfront and stared at the lagoon and the stately shape of San Giorgio Maggiore across the water. People seemed so small next to the grandeur of this city. It was as if Venice had created itself somehow, or been built by a lost race of giants. It was hard to imagine how any modern man or woman could possess such wild and seemingly impossible dreams of a magnificent world built on nothing but mud and water. Sofia would feel at home in this oddly unique place. That was one good reason for her to return, and not a morbid one.
The phone rang again.
‘Mother . . .’
‘It’s not your mother,’ said a voice down the line.
‘Silvio . . .’
Her deputy sounded both cross and a little scared, which lifted her spirits somewhat. He immediately launched into a rant about reports and meetings and how very
, very furious the malevolent grey-suited, bean-counting bastards upstairs were getting about her lengthening absence from the Questura.
‘Tell them to go screw themselves,’ Teresa said. ‘It’s just been a couple of days. People have gone sick for longer.’
‘You didn’t go sick and you didn’t say you’d be away this long,’ he pointed out.
‘I didn’t know! Tell them it’s something personal. God knows I’m owed the time.’
Silvio Di Capua muttered a barely audible curse.
‘You really don’t get it, do you? If you’d handled this properly from the beginning no one could possibly object. But you didn’t. You just walked. Handed that bastard Orsini the opportunity to screw you. On a plate. And . . . he . . . will.’
This was tiresome.
‘Oh for pity’s sake, Silvio. No one hired me for my communication skills. Go sort it out.’
‘This is not a joke,’ he cried. ‘They’ve cancelled the quarterly budget review meeting because you can’t be there and you haven’t even started the departmental report.’
‘Oh my. Don’t let the criminals find out. They’ll run wild.’
‘That’s not funny.’
‘Listen,’ she went on. ‘Scribble some numbers on a piece of paper. Go along in my place. Nod and smile. That always works. I’ll deal with it when I get back.’
‘Which will be when?’
‘When I’m finished here.’
‘Teresa!’ She didn’t ever remember Silvio Di Capua yelling at her like this before. ‘Are you listening to me? You’ve walked out on us without asking anyone’s permission. This is serious. Job-threatening serious. They want you back. Today. Catch a plane. Now. Tomorrow at the latest . . .’
‘Not going to happen.’
‘In that case prepare to get suspended.’
He rang off after that. She couldn’t help but laugh.
